Pages

July 16, 2015

~*~RELEASE BLITZ ~*~ CAGED by SHAY SAVAGE

This is
not made for TV. This is the raw, brutal underground of no-holds-barred combat.
Inside the cage there is nothing but me and the pain I inflict on those who
dare enter. In the cage, I never have to worry about anyone but myself. Yet,
when she began standing outside of the cage, everything changed. I was no
longer fighting for the money or the glory – I was fighting for her.

“Are you
just stupid?” I probably would have gone on, but she wrapped her arms around
herself and glared up at me.

“Stop
yelling at me!” she screamed.She turned
away, but I saw her reach up with the back of her hand to swoop underneath her
eyes.

Shit.

I turned
slightly away from her and practically bit down on my tongue to keep myself
from saying anything else.I brought my
fisted hands up against my stomach and tried to pull the tension inside of
myself, work through it, and calm down.I could hear her crying combined with choked breaths and sniffles.

“Fuck,” I
mumbled under my breath.I was starting
to come off the fighting high I had been on—the tears might have helped with
that—and my stomach felt tight.

After
three long, deep breaths, I looked back to the girl on the ground and saw her
frantically rubbing at her eyes and cheeks.She didn’t look at me as she reached out and pulled her mostly empty bag
close to her.She looked inside and then
looked around her at all her things on the ground.

“Sorry,”
I mumbled.I wasn’t all that great at
apologies, and I figured now wasn’t going to be much different.I’d obviously upset her with all my shitty
comments, though.“I didn’t mean to…I
just…”

I stopped
talking.I didn’t know what to say, and
I felt bad about yelling at her.She
looked at me all red-eyed with tears staining her cheeks.

“Just don’t do that shit anymore.”I let out a big sigh.

She
nodded once and then reached out to grab something off the ground near her and
shoved it back into the bag.From the
amount of stuff scattered all over the street, my estimate on the size of the
so-called purse wasn’t too far off.There was an umbrella, a little flashlight, a bunch of tubes and
bottles, and at least a half dozen pens.As I looked around some more, I saw a small notebook, a paperback book,
keys, a bottle of hand lotion that was nowhere near travel sized, a stack of
tissues wrapped up in a Ziploc bag, two sets of earbuds, and a checkbook.There was also a whole pile of ponytail
holders, bobby pins, and those little hair-holder-things that looked like
teeth.

There was
shit from her bag from one side of the fucking street to the other.

She
started crawling around, gathering it all up, and cramming it back inside,
which gave me a fabulous view of her ass in the short-shorts style waitress
uniform the place up the street usually demanded.I could kind of see how she might have
thought she could use the bag as a weapon—there had been more stuff in there than
really should have been able to fit.I
looked around on the ground to see if there was an actual kitchen sink, or at
least part of one, but I didn’t see anything metal.There was something that looked like a small
rock, though.

“How do
you even carry that thing around?” I asked.

“What?”

“That…that
purse-bag-thingy there,” I said, pointing and shaking my finger at it.I wouldn’t have admitted it, but the whole
idea of the thing scared me, and I wasn’t sure why.I felt like if I got too close to it I might
get sucked in, never to be seen again.“It’s insane.”

Her eyes
became little slits as she looked up to me.

“There is
nothing wrong with my purse!” she growled.

“It’s
huge,” I said.

“It has
everything I need in it.”

“It has
everything you and ten of your friends could need for a week,” I replied with a
laugh.“I know there are people who
carry Chihuahuas in their purse, but you could fit a Dane in there.”

Shay Savage lives in Cincinnati, Ohio
with her family and a variety of household pets. She is an accomplished public
speaker, and holds the rank of Distinguished Toastmaster from Toastmasters
International. When not writing, she enjoys science fiction movies,
masquerading as a zombie, is a HUGE Star Wars fan, and member of the 501st
Legion of Stormtroopers. When the geek fun runs out, she also loves soccer in
any and all forms - especially the Columbus Crew, Arsenal and Bayern Munich -
and anxiously awaits the 2014 World Cup. Savage holds a degree in psychology,
and she brings a lot of that knowledge into the characters within her stories.